Saturday, March 16, 2013

Devourment – Conceived in Sewage

Devourment – Conceived in Sewage

Relapse Records, 2013

I have to be honest here: for me the
crowning glory of this recording is, about 89% of the time, simply
the guitar sound. Not always one to overtly let my eyes roll back and
embarrassingly bathe in sonics (outside of song structure,
overarching songwriting, whatever other messages the music conveys),
especially in mixed company, this album has me reveling in
iron-fisted, tyranically controlled distortion and downtuned guitar
slaughter to a degree that would discomfort me in a projected
externalization if I were somehow an outside onlooker still capable
of shame. First and second drafts of the guitar's descriptions were
red-facedly lustful while halting a hair's breadth from the queasily
sexual or Costanza-like combination of the same and culinary flights,
even...Rabelaisian? The words are halting, it's best one witness the
darkness, width and breadth oneself, as usual. Download and press
play. Buy and wait and press play. Feast. It's death metal. It's
catchy, moving, well-written death metal that clawed its way up from
outré,contrarian-adoring underground slam. I can only guess (or picture
in the mind's eye) that this sound is the product of hushed, eager
confabulations and amp-testing sessions between guitarist Ruben and
engineer/fellow admirer of all things concrete-laden, Rutan. I would
be pleasantly surprised to learn that Rosas entered Mana Studios with
everything already planned out and dialed in. Was the Hate Eternal
leader able to flex his expertise, show off the capabilities of his
studio and gear collection? Maybe some interviewer in the future will
ask about this. In any case, it is this incredibly thick, serpentine,
black coalescence of punishing (yet beautifully clear) noise that
converts the guitar writing from merely an instrument of simple song
construction to a device/vehicle of expression that is throwing off
band and album-themed signifiers with each note: the guitar sound IS
the embodiment of disgusted misanthropy (askance in the mirror),
sewer sludge, refuse and detritus-lives, nihilism, hopelessness,
slave ideals and dive bar toilet futures. Production as voice, once
again. Production as a vital part. That Devourment take this
solidified, musical concatenation of ruined, garbage people and
cast-off DNA and make it dance, make it sing, make it seem to enjoy
and perversely flaunt its own willful worthlessness in the face of an
inherited hierarchy of Official Reason, is what becomes their
attractiveness, their subversive, irritating, entertaining
value...even more: their putrefying (it has to be this way) meaning.